Thies Pfeiffer is full professor for human-computer interaction at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer. He received the Diploma and Doctoral degree in computer science from Bielefeld University, Germany, in 2003 and 2010.
In 2003, he joined the Psycholinguistics Group of Prof. Dr. Gert Rickheit at the Faculty of Linguistics at Bielefeld University, where his research was focused on sentence processing and the visual world paradigm in a project of the collaborative research centre 360 “Situated Artificial Communicators”. In 2006, Thies Pfeiffer joined Ipke Wachsmuth’s Artificial Intelligence group to work in the FP6 project “PASION – Psychologically Social Interaction Over Networks”. There he worked on telepresence and social network analysis. During that time, he also worked on his doctoral thesis on gaze and gesture in natural virtual reality interfaces, which he completed in 2010. Since then, he was senior researcher in the Artificial Intelligence group and technical director of the laboratory for artificial intelligence and virtual reality. In 2013, Thies Pfeiffer joined the central lab facilities of CITEC under the lead of Sven Wachsmuth. There, he was responsible for CITEC’s Virtual Reality Laboratory and the Immersive Media Lab at the Faculty of Technology until June 2019.